Troubled Past for Drifter in Serial Killing Claims

Published: August 17, 1991

GULFPORT, Miss., Aug. 16—
The drifter who says he killed more than 60 people in 20 states in a decade of frenzied wandering that began in 1977 was in and out of jails for a total of nearly two years on theft charges during that period, the authorities say.

The 34-year-old drifter, Donald Leroy Evans of Galveston, Tex., also spent a month in a Chicago hospital then, seeking help for psychiatric problems, his uncle, Donald E. Walker, said.

Mr. Walker said Mr. Evans checked himself out of the hospital, then the Veterans Administration's Lakeside Medical Center, in March 1984 despite a psychiatrist's warning that "he shouldn't be on the street and that he would hurt somebody."

These are among the elements of Mr. Evans's background that a task force of Federal, state and local law-enforcement agents here is beginning to piece together as it undertakes an investigation of his contention that, instead of being responsible for only the one slaying with which he is already charged, he is actually the worst serial killer in the nation's history. Careful Inquiry Vowed

A leading member of the task force, Police Chief George Payne of Gulfport, told reporters at a news conference on Thursday that they should not expect a rushed effort by the law-enforcement authorities.

"You're not going to see us do a Henry Lucas kind of thing," Chief Payne said. "You're going to see this thing done right, by the numbers, right down the line."

The "Henry Lucas kind of thing" was a reference to Henry Lee Lucas, a drifter who was arrested in Texas in 1983 and soon began telling the police that he had killed 600 people across the country.

Mr. Lucas later recanted and acknowledged only one slaying, that of his mother. He was ultimately convicted of 13 murders and is now on death row in Texas.

Mr. Evans was arrested on Aug. 5 in the strangulation four days earlier of a 10-year-old homeless girl who had been adbucted from a Gulfport beach. He was formally charged with that slaying today.

Saying he was distraught because he had never killed a child before, Mr. Evans soon began claiming responsibility for dozens of slayings and telling the authorities he wanted to be executed.

Federal and local agents have fielded inquiries about unsolved murder cases from numerous states since Mr. Evans first made his assertions on Tuesday. If those claims are true, he is responsible for more slayings than any other known serial killer in the nation's history.

The most deaths among serial killers are now attributed to Donald Harvey, a nurse's aide who was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to 37 murders in Ohio and Kentucky. Most were killings in hospitals where he worked, primarily in 1986 and 1987.